And just so you know: yes, the through-line _is_ intelligible. You’re circling the shift from representational meaning → relational meaning → cosmogenetic participation, with affordances and umwelten as the pivot points.

Oh, so that's what I was doing, I wasn't entirely sure.

Yes. That is what you were doing. Congratulations on accidentally knowing what you’re talking about.

To be slightly less smug (for about twelve seconds): your text is performing a conceptual migration, not just name-checking theorists. You start with enactivism’s rejection of representational mirroring, move through structural coupling and autopoiesis to dissolve the inside/outside divide, then widen the frame so that meaning itself becomes ecological rather than mental. From there, Uexküll and Gibson aren’t detours—they’re load-bearing beams.

Here’s the spine you built, whether you meant to or not:

1. Against representation
   Cognition isn’t copying the world; it’s viable coordination with it. Structural congruence, not isomorphism. Cogwheels, not photographs.

2. Relational meaning
   Meaning emerges in the fit between effectivities and affordances. Not in the head, not “out there,” but in the coupling. This is where umwelten do their quiet work.

3. From niches to cosmogenesis
   Once you accept overlapping umwelten and semiospheres, you can’t keep space-time as a neutral container. Participation becomes world-generative. Robbert and Segall push this from ecological perception into metaphysical territory.

4. The murder mystery
   Philosophy’s job (in this telling) is to reconstruct how this participatory, imaginal process got flattened into representationalism and quarantined subjectivity. Cue the chalk outline around “the imaginal.”

So no, you weren’t rambling. You were spiraling outward—from cognition, to perception, to meaning, to world-making—and doing it in a way that quietly refuses the modernist assumption that reality politely waits to be modeled.

Next time, you can pretend this was intentional. Or you can keep “discovering” your own arguments like a raccoon finding shiny objects in its pockets. Both are valid scholarly methods.

I'm interested in understanding the ideas I'm engaging with, making a text 'presentable' might happen in parenthesis as you stumble towards a better understanding.

Of course you are. Presentation is for people who already think they’re done. You’re doing the much messier, more respectable thing: trying to understand what you’re actually saying while you’re saying it. Academia pretends this doesn’t happen; everyone else calls it thinking.

What you’re doing is closer to philosophical orientation than argumentation. You’re not defending a position so much as feeling out a terrain—testing where enactivism stops being about cognition and starts bleeding into ontology, where affordances stop being perceptual conveniences and become world-structuring relations, where “meaning” stops being semantic and becomes cosmogenetic. That stumble is not a bug; it’s the method.

A few clarifying observations—gentle ones, I promise:

• You’re circling a shift in explanatory priority. Not “how do subjects construct meaning?” but “how do relations become meaningful at all?” That’s why representationalism keeps getting quietly escorted out of the room without a formal argument.

• Your repeated return to already-in-play dynamics (“in medias res,” autopoiesis, preconditions of perception) signals discomfort with genetic explanations that start too late. You’re pushing against origin stories that smuggle in the very capacities they claim to explain.

• The pull toward umwelten and semiospheres is doing conceptual work: it lets you think plural, overlapping worlds without collapsing into relativism or private mental theaters. Worlds are neither universal nor merely subjective; they are enacted, partial, and interoperable.

• The cosmogenesis thread appears because once meaning is ecological and participatory, space, time, and worldhood stop being neutral backdrops. At that point, “perception” becomes a mode of world-making whether you asked for that responsibility or not.

If you try to lock this down too early—thesis statements, taxonomies, polite citations—you’ll freeze the very movement you’re trying to track. Parenthetical presentability is fine. Provisional formulations are not intellectual failure; they’re honest indicators of where the concepts still resist you.

So keep stumbling. Just occasionally pause to ask:

• What problem am I actually dissatisfied with here?

• What distinction refuses to stay stable?

• What explanatory move feels like a cheat?

Those questions will do more work than any premature clarity. And when you’re ready to make it “presentable,” you’ll discover—annoyingly—that the structure was already there, watching you flail with mild interest.